


to the moon

by softrixie (softlightwood)



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: F/F, im so excited about this, lesbians au, x files au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-03-03 17:24:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13345974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softlightwood/pseuds/softrixie
Summary: Trixie finds her by the desk, reclined in a leather spinning chair with her feet propped carelessly against the stacks of paperwork, ankles crossed delicately. She's pretty, and Trixie doesn't remember her being pretty; she remembers sheaths of long, blonde hair hiding a downturned face and hands shaking around a portfolio as the office-jerks tittered about little green men. Certainly, she would have remembered this; red lips around a half-burned cigarette, dark eyes peering out from beneath hastily-chopped bangs, tempestuously braided her that somehow worked in her favour.At the soft clearing of a throat, Trixie moves her eyes from the hem of Katya's pencil skirt and holds out a tentative hand. "I'm-""Trixie Mattel" Katya interrupts, eyes sparkling. "Yes, I know who you are and I know why you're here. You want to debunk my X-Files"





	1. across a crowded bureau

**Author's Note:**

> hi!! its been a very long time since I've written a chaptered story (honest to god years) but after binge-watching the x-files and drag race in tandem, this idea hit me and refused to leave so here we are!!

The sun is resting delicately beneath a pink-peach sky by the time Trixie arrives at the FBI headquarters. The _click, click, click_ of her shoes echo in circles around the foyer, taking her fondly back to the very first time she had ever set foot in this building as a full-fledged, qualified agent. A giddy energy had coursed from her fingertips down to the pointed toes of the shoes her mother had vigorously polished that morning, too nervous on Trixie's behalf to do anything other than pointless tasks while she tried to reassure her that she wouldn't be involved in a shoot-out on her very first day on the job. The sharp rap of her shoes on the patterned floor had made her feel _important_ , like she was someone who mattered, for the first time in her life. Of course, back then, all she'd done was pick up her badge from the front desk and have someone direct her to the paperwork she was tasked with filing. That was five years ago, now, and while she is just as in love with her job as she had been back when she was fetching higher-ups their coffee, she's slightly less in-love with being called into a meeting with the head of the district at 7pm on her day off.

Tribe knows that she shouldn't be  _too_ worried; she's a good agent with a decent, borderline-impressive record of closed cases and she's well regarded for her medical school background, three years of medical school prior to a career switch combined with her FBI training making her near-expert in the autopsy room. It doesn't stop her palms from sweating just slightly as she waits to be called in, though, nor the nervous tap of her foot when she's finally called through into the office.

Chief Charles is seated behind his desk when Trixie whisks in, hands folded neatly atop a stack of manila files and eyes fixed on the upper-edge of the chair opposite. "Agent Mattel," he says, years of practice giving his voice the professional twinge that lands just on the side of unnerving, "Thank you for coming in."

"Of course, Sir." She sits carefully, adjusting the black blazer when it shifts and lamenting the lack of colour; black was her _impress the boss_ or _break bad news_ attire, and it always killed her mood. "Might I ask what this is about?"

Charles hums. "You're a good agent, Ms Mattel. You closed more cases in your first year on the job than most agents here and your medical knowledge puts you ahead of the game in many areas of work. You came straight here from the academy, is that right? Recruited from medical school?"

"Yes, Sir"

"May I ask why you decided against pursuing a career in Medicine?"

A strange question, Trixie thinks. Not what she expected, and hardly relevant - unless he's firing her and recommending that she become a doctor. "Well, I liked medicine well enough, but I wanted to _establish_ myself. I felt that the FBI was the perfect place to do that"

"Hm" he says. "You've certainly done that. It hasn't escaped my attention, however, that in your five years with us you're yet to take on a partner. In your interview, you'd expressed that this was something you looked forward to, and so i find myself curious. What changed?"

"Oh," Trixie shifts, not having expected this turn of questioning today. A small, warning voice in the back of her head reminds her to tread carefully; the last thing she wanted was to be stuck with some newbie agent because her track record was _too_ good. "I'm yet to meet anyone I trust enough, thats all"

Chief Charles tilts his head, making eye contact with a man Trixie had evidently been too nervous to notice before; he was sitting away in the corner of the room, a cigarette tamped between his lips, eyes dark and steady. It made her shiver, eyes flitting back to the desk and the mysterious files beneath Charles' hands. "What do you know," Charles asks, voice low, "about the X-Files?"

Impulsively, Trixie curves her mouth into a smile, smudging it away quickly behind her hand when she notices neither Charles or the suspicious man following suit. "If I'm correct, they're to do with unexplained phenomena. Cold cases, with mostly unsubstantiated evidence"

Charles nods. "And what do you know, about Agent Yekaterina Zamolodchikova?"

"Well, she had a nickname, back in the academy.  _Spooky Katya_." Neither Charles or the man show any sign of interest, and Trixie clears her throat uncomfortably. "I mean, professionally speaking, I know that she's the best agent in the violent crimes analytical unit, and that one of her monographs profiled and incarcerated a prolific serial killer. Even if her recent focuses are a little more..eccentric"

"Agent Zamolodchikova has developed quite the all-consuming interest for investigating the X-Files," Charles says, lifting the folder from the desk to hold it between fidgeting, impatient hands. "I would like you to work on a few cases with her; monitor her progress, make your own professional judgements and report back to me after each session"

Trixie considers this.

"You want me to debunk the X-Files?"

"What I want," and theres a tinge of impatience, now, "is for you to observe and analyse using your excellent scientific knowledge and acute judgement, and make conclusions accordingly. Can you do that?"

"Of course, Sir"

Nodding, he hands over the folder and in the corner, the cigarette man lights up another. Who  _is_ he? 

"You will find Agent Zamolodchikova on the lower floor, room 107. I look forward to receiving your reports"

Trixie manages to maintain her cool right up until the office door clicks into place and then she's gripping the folder so hard that her nails leave crescent-shaped dents in the cardboard, huffing pointedly beneath her breath. _Four years_. Four years of being a damn good agent, and now she's being made to babysit some crazy, wayward agent because the FBI would rather send Trixie on a goose-chase than just fire some pre-occupied idiot. 

Room 107 is right at the end of the corridor, situated just beneath a flickering light, which is ironic enough that Trixie almost turns on her heel and heads for home. Instead she approaches the door, tilting her head at the faint noises coming from behind it before extending her hand to deliver three, sharp raps. 

"Wrong room" a voice calls, accent tinged with something Trixie doesn't quite recognise yet, "nobody down here but the FBI's most _Un_ -wanted" and ah, that's right.  _Zamolodchikova._ She's Russian, and Trixie ignores her fascination in order to nudge her way into the room. It's small, probably a former filing-room if the lack of a window is anything to go by, though there's a printed mock-up of a window tacked to the far wall, peeling at the corners. Strange art is scattered across the dull walls; a misshapen painting of a cat, a deck of old, worn tarot cards all pinned together, a huge poster of a generic hillside background with an imposed UFO, the words 'I WANT TO BELIEVE' printed in white. 

Trixie finds her by the desk, reclined in a leather spinning chair with her feet propped carelessly against the stacks of paperwork, ankles crossed delicately. She's pretty, and Trixie doesn't remember her being pretty; she remembers sheaths of long, blonde hair hiding a downturned face and hands shaking around a portfolio as the office-jerks tittered about little green men. Certainly, she would have remembered this; red lips around a half-burned cigarette, dark eyes peering out from beneath hastily-chopped bangs, tempestuously braided her that somehow worked in her favour.

At the soft clearing of a throat, Trixie moves her eyes from the hem of Katya's pencil skirt and holds out a tentative hand. "I'm-"

"Trixie Mattel" Agent Zamolodchikova interrupts, eyes sparkling. "Yes, I know who you are and I know why you're here. You want to debunk my X-Files"

Trixie opens her mouth, closes it. Tries again, tilts her head; "Um. I've been assigned to work with you"

"Huh" She says, pushing her hands behind her head and dislodging the headphones balanced in her hair, "who'd you piss off to get stuck down here with me?"

"I'm looking forward to working with you" Trixie tries, but Zamolodchikova just tips her head back, closing her eyes.

"You're not. You're one of the most highly regarded agents in this place; medical doctor, teaching autopsy at the academy,  _incredible_ case-closing record. Undergraduate in Physics," she tips forwards to fumble around on her desk until she finds a pair of glasses, sliding them on over her nose to peer at a sheet of paper, "hm.  _Einsteins Twin Paradox, A New Interpretation._ A study by Trixie Mattel"

Trixie opens her mouth to speak, but she waves a hand, reaching for a different file in the disaster-zone that is her desk. "Yes, I did read it. I liked it, actually, its just that the laws of physics rarely line up with my area of work"

"Look, Agent Zamolodchikova-"

"Katya"

" _Katya_ " and the exasperation seeps through, now, "I was assigned to help with the X-Files. I prefer to work alone, I imagine"" she sweeps a hand toward the messy room, "that you do, too. But Charles wants what Charles wants, so I'd appreciate it if you stopped trying to patronise me-"

Katya sits up abruptly, swinging her feet down and twisting to stare earnestly at Trixie. It's a little disconcerting; "I'm not! Sorry, I'm really not. Just that I thought - as I still do, mind you - that you'd been sent down here only to spy on me"

And there's that languid smile again, and it hits Trixie that Katya knows about all of the rumours, the academy nicknames and the jokes and the scorn and she lets it all roll off her shoulders, smiles at the people who laugh at her work. Trixie can't decide if this is going to make her job harder or easier, and she simply smiles, nodding twice. Unbothered, Katya extends the hand still holding a file and waves it at Trixie. "What's your medical opinion on this?"

Inside the folder is a photograph of what looks to be a woman's hip, dotted with circular red scars. Trixie hums, "insect bites? needle punctures, maybe?"

Katya reaches over and snags a slip of paper, showing a molecular scan of something. "How about this?"

"Organic" Trixie confirms, tilting her head. "Synthetic...protein, maybe? I don't know, what is it?"

"Not a clue" Katya admits, eyes bright and enthused, "but they found it inside these." She holds up a small, plastic packet containing what seems to be a thin metal tube. "Six of them, one for each scar. Their molecular makeup is weird, too. Can't tell what it is"

"Okay" Trixie says, "a drug thing? A cult thing?"

Katya spreads her hands, palms up. "Here it is again, in Portland," she points to another image, "and New England, and finally in Chicago"

She looks oddly pleased, and Trixie folds her arms. "You have a theory?

"Oh, several." Katya shifts so that she's straddling her rolling chair, arms folded on the top so that she can rest her chin where her wrists overlap, eyes staring into Trixie's. "Do you believe in the existence of extra terrestrials?"

"No"

Expecting this, Katya nods, but doesn't look remotely discouraged. Trixie rolls her eyes. "I mean, logically, the conditions required to sustain life and the sheer distance you would need to travel in order to discover such a place...it just isn't possible, scientifically"

"Mhm," she grabs the folder again. "This girl, Chicago, is the fourth. All of the victim's families report them going missing for twenty-four hours, unable to recall where they were, even that they were gone in the first place. Then, the scars, and a week later, dead"

"I still stand by drugs, or cult" Trixie says, "but either way, this girl died of  _something_. Maybe they missed something in the toxicology, who knows, but it doesn't mean the answer is  _aliens"_

 _"_ Sure, sure" Katya says, waving a dismissive hand, and Trixie knows she doesn't believe a word of it. "Either way, we're flying down to Chicago tomorrow morning," she folds her feet back up onto her desk, _"_ _partner."_

Katya asks Trixie to meet her at her apartment as "I'm not a professional, Trixie. I sit in my office eating pasta and smoking cigarettes because no one cares enough to discipline me" and thats how she finds herself outside a nondescript white door, listening to a few bumps and bangs and the odd " _ow, Блядь, дерьмо,"_ stifling laughter until Katya finally opens the door.

"Sorry!" she blurts out, "I overslept!"

"Sure" Trixie says, not admitting that she also overslept, that she almost burned her ear trying to straighten her ponytail and that she's not wearing a blazer because her only clean skirt was pink and the only clean blazer was blue. Katya is wearing a knee-length embroidered skirt with a black blouse tucked in. Trixie lifts a brow.

"What?" Katya asks, "its not like anything I investigate actually counts as official business. I don't have to wear a monkey suit"

"Fair enough" Trixie surmises, smoothing her white shirt a little consciously. Katya beams, and then she makes a face.

"I need coffee. And a smoke, You want coffee? I'll be right back" and Trixie is left to step tentatively into the apartment, deciding to perch on the dated sofa swathed in colourful throws and pillows. There's a file on the coffee table, which she should probably look at, but she finds herself more interested in the frankly bizarre decor of the place. Odd, ugly ornaments and off-kilter paintings, clashing patterns and knick-knacks  _everywhere_. Katya comes wobbling in with two mugs and Trixie averts her eyes from what appears to be an abstract painting of a naked person, taking the mug gratefully and wincing as Katya knocks back black coffee like water. Her hair is pinned up in a messy-bun today and Trixie notices her cheekbones, now that they're not framed by braids, sharp and smooth and catching just so on the light from the window. She's hot, objectively. Not that Trixie  _cares,_ but she is. Her eyes are still outlined with dark shadow but she hasn't put on her lipstick, yet, and her mouth is pink and soft. It seems to be moving, too, and Trixie realises she's being spoken to.

"Huh?"

"Maybe I should let you finish that coffee" Katya says, bringing one slender foot to rest on the table so that she can fasten the clasp of her shoe, "I just have to find this other shoe and my phone charger, so take your time"

Trixie blushes into her mug as she leaves, noticing, now, that it seems to be decorated with little spaceships and alien heads. Momentarily Katya peers her head around the bedroom doorway, noticing the way Trixie studies the mug, and when Trixie meets her eye, she winks.

Just yesterday Trixie was thinking about applying for a position as a Senior Agent, tossing up whether or not she wanted to manage the medical or fieldwork side of the district - she was qualified, quite frankly, for both - and wondering what her next case would be. Now, inexplicably, she's in the home of an eccentric detective, alien fanatic, illogical Russian detective and the only thing on her stupid, one-track mind is the smudge of dark, red lipstick on Katya's mouth when she winked, just now. 

Exhaling, Trixie stands and walks with her coffee to stand by the window and look out onto the rainy street. _This is work,_ she tells herself. This is someone who falls lower in Chief Charles' regard than any other agent in the entire Bureau, and Trixie is here to do one thing, and one thing only. Disprove the relevance of the X Files. Be objective, scientific, _logical_. Not dwell over the pretty curve of Katya's waist where her skirt sits, because none of it will even matter when Trixie hands in her report, and Katya winds up hating her anyway. 

"You ready?" Katya calls out, and when Trixie turns she's holding a duffel bag in one hand whilst trying to fasten in a delicate hoop earring with the other. God. Trixie turns to take one last look at the rainy street, lip pulled tight between her teeth. Is she ready? To potentially ruin someone else's career, just so that she can further her own? Because that must be what this is, after all. Charles must have caught wind of Trixie asking around about higher positions, requesting application forms and references just in case. Must be testing her, trying to see just how far she's willing to go for the Bureau. She drums her nails against the side of the mug, once, sharply. 

"I'm ready" she says, swallowing down her unease to fix Katya with a smile.

 


	2. road trip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I don't understand _how_ you can be friends with them," as she talks, Trixie unpins her tightly wound ponytail and runs soothing fingers through her curls, massaging the pressure from her scalp; "none of their ideas are remotely plausible"
> 
> From her bed, Katya looks up at Trixie through thick lashes, hands propped behind her head. "What? You don't think its _plausible_ that someone could think you're hot?"
> 
> "Shut up" Trixie tells her, and then "fine. _Almost_ none of their ideas are plausible. Besides, I'm not sure how much of a compliment it is. They probably think the aliens are hot"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for all of the lovely comments on the first chapter!! this is my first time writing for this pairing and I'm super excited about this story. I should mention that this isn't beta-read so I apologise in advance for any mistakes that might crop up!!

_...According to the autopsy results (which I have attached below) it is clear that the cause of death was, in this instance, induced by an unnamed and yet positively narcotic substance. This conclusion fits with the secondary toxicology results I obtained from the other victims. The final piece of evidence is that all five families testify that the victims were involved in what we now know to be an online cult of sorts prior to their death. The leader was...._

Trixie leans back in her desk chair, shoulders rolling to smooth away a lingering ache from hours of work. The investigation had been quick and short, and frankly Trixie has no idea why the case was an X-File in the first place. Katya had looked disappointed when they led away the man believed to be the leader of an internet-based cult, charging him with the five murders, and Trixie hadn't realised until right then just how serious she was about this whole thing, how determined she had been that the answer would be extra-terrestrial. Over the past week and a half they'd solved two other cases, mostly easy enough once they dug deep into the initial police reports, and today was the first opportunity they'd had to return to the bureau. Katya has been sitting cross-legged on the floor of her office ever since she'd hauled Trixie inside that morning, smoking her way through a packet of Marlboro Red whilst making notes in a small, leather-bound notebook and sifting through different manilla folders. She'd offered Trixie the desk so that she could do her write-up and it felt wrong, somehow, to be contributing to Katya's downfall while using her office, sitting across the room from her. As she's considering making the trek up to the communal coffee-machine, Trixie is startled by a sharp, insistent rapping on the door.

"Come in" Katya calls out, cigarette dangling precariously from her mouth and over a pile of papers. She adds, under a disgruntled breath, something in Russian that has the distinct shape of a curse-word. The door opens in a wide-arc and Agent Chachki stands in the doorway, hands folded neatly across her chest, immaculate brows raised to the skies.

"So it _is_ true" she says, voice flat, eyes boring into Trixie's own. "They've got you working with _Spooky Zamo_ "

"Violet" Trixie reprimands, instantly and embarrassed, at the same time Katya throws down a folder and jumps to her feet. She's wearing fitted red trousers today, slimmed in at the ankles and hemmed just above the waist, and they make her look taller than she actually stands. The black, semi-sheer blouse has been a source of headache ever since Trixie spotted it that morning, but it suits her, and the heels she's wearing take her to Violet's height when she approaches, even if they don't quite take her to Trixie's.

"Hello, I'm afraid we haven't met" Katya says, sporting a beaming smile, thrusting out a hand for Violet to shake. She does, shake Katya's hand, because she prides herself on being polite and professional most of the time, and she shoots Trixie a side-glance as she does so. "I'm _Katya_ " and the way she enunciates it is poignant, Trixie thinks, a _fuck you_.

"Violet" her voice is a little curt, now; Trixie thinks she's probably embarrassed, but thats not an emotion she regularly processes. "Trixie and I were in the academy together"

"Oh, I _do_ remember you" Katya says, voice lilted with something snarky, but she doesn't elaborate. Instead, she tucks a loose part of her blouse back into the waistband of her pants and looks at Trixie for a moment, considering something. "I'm going to grab a coffee, want one?"

Trixie smiles, nods, swallows down an aborted apology for her friend's behaviour and watches Katya leave, hopelessly. As the office door clicks into place behind her, Violet perches herself on the corner of Katya's desk, smoothing down her pencil skirt and levelling Trixie with a concerned stare. 

Trixie tips her head back, eyes closed.

"She's nice, you know. Katya"

"First name basis already?" Violet asks, a smile tilting her lips into a pretty curve, and then, "she's hotter than I remember"

"Leave off" Trixie says, on autopilot, before blushing pink to the tips of her cheeks and immediately hunching over the desk drawer in an effort to feign searching for something. Violet scoffs, but she doesn't comment on it. "What do you want, anyway?"

"Oh, nothing. It's just that I asked to be paired with you for a case involving an exhumation, but rumour had it you'd partnered up and were in the basement with Zamo. How'd you manage to piss Charles off that badly? Or have you completely lost it?"

Something like irritation begins to curl in Trixie's stomach, and she starts tidying papers absently. Violet's sarcastic, often blunt attitude is one of the reasons Trixie loves her so much, but this situation is ticking her off the wrong way; It must, she reasons with herself, have to do with the vague guilt she's been feeling about having to debunk something she can see that Katya is passionate about, even if she doesn't understand why. Twirling the end of her ponytail around her pointer finger, Trixie breathes out a sigh of frustration.

"Charles did ask me to work with Katya for a while, monitor her, I guess." She edges around the subject, a little, not wanting to outright admit what she _knows_ her role to be. "I like working with her, though. We've only done a couple of cases but she's, I don't know. Different?"

"That's one word for it, sure" Violet says, eyes trailing along a scrap of paper on Katya's desk that, upon further inspection, outlines a description of a UFO sighting. "Well, whatever. I just wanted to make sure you were alive down here, Trix. See you for coffee soon?"

Distantly, Trixie hears what she assumes to be the soft _click, click, click_ of Katya's heels in the corridor and she nods tightly, smiling, ushering Violet away with a glance. As Violet stands and tidies the fit of her silk blouse, Katya backs into the room - literally, having opened the door with her ass so that she can hoist the styrofoam cups into the air - and plonks a cup of frothy coffee just within reach of Trixie's hand. Violet breezes by her, black curls bouncing at her shoulders, and Katya folds herself down onto the floor again to sift through more folders.

It's awkward.

They were working silently before, but now it feels heavier, somehow. Uncomfortable. 

A crinkle, as Katya sets some paper aside. A click, tap, scribble as she jots something down. A muted thump, as she puts her coffee on top of a stack of paper.

"Katya-"

"You don't have to apologise"

"-Oh"

A pause. Katya huffs out an annoyed sigh, standing from the floor and moving over to perch on the edge of Trixie's desk, where Violet had been moments prior. Trixie is acutely aware of the fabric of Katya's trousers, just inches from the side of her hand. She looks up to meet Katya's eye, sailing determinedly by the _goddamned_ blouse as she does so. There's black kohl smudged around Katya's eyes - intentionally or not, Trixie can't tell - and she looks somewhat serious.

"I'm going to tell you something" Katya says. She picks up a pen, spinning it between her fingers, and Trixie realises that she's nervous. "When I was twelve years old, my little sister went 'missing'. They never found her"

"Oh, Katya-"

"-no one would believe me, when I told them what happened. What I _saw_. She was eight, and my parents had gone grocery shopping. I was in charge, and we were playing board games in the kitchen. Samantha lost, and she was always a sore loser, and she went to sulk in the front room. I knew she'd be back in five minutes, with that little pet lip of hers, asking if we could play again, so I left her to it and went to make a snack. Then I heard her scream, and there was this _light_. I've never seen anything so bright, and I rushed in there, and she- Well. She was in mid-air, suspended, in this shroud of light and as soon as I got into that room I stopped being able to move. I mean I was trying, I was screaming the house down but my limbs were just - fixed. I had to stand there and watch as she was abducted. By aliens. And then I blacked out, and woke up to my mother shaking me, crying, asking me where Sam was and why the windows were all broken in. No one ever believed me, and I can't tell you how many child psychologists tried to tell me I blocked out the trauma of what _really_ happened, and that's why the X-Files are so important to me. I know the truth, Trixie. The truth is out there, and I have to find it"

Trixie had heard, through the grapevine, about Katya's sister, but hearing the story in person is heartbreaking. Trixie really, truly sympathises, and yet she _knows_ \- if only Katya had been able to overcome her coping mechanisms as a child, really come to terms with what happened to her sister. This whole thing, the X-Files...

" _So_ " Katya says, tossing the pen to one side and interrupting Trixie's thoughts, "thats why you don't have to apologise for people like Violet Chachki. I've never hidden that story, my reasons for starting and pursuing the X-Files. Not once, not ever. I've heard everything and worse, so what your friend thinks doesn't bother me one bit. I would hope, though" and she leans in, just so, mouth tipping up into a coy smile, "that _your_ thoughts toward me are a little kinder, Agent Mattel"

Before Trixie can even begin to untangle her thoughts enough to respond to that, Katya hops off of the desk and immediately shouts in triumph, snatching up a folder from the ground. "I knew I had this somewhere!"

Baffled, she watches as Katya fumbles through sheets of evidence, pulling out a case report and holding it side-by-side with the one she'd written up today. "Same description, same city, same block. This is it! Get your things, Trix. We're driving to Delaware"

 

Katya drives like a maniac.

Trixie spends the hour and a half journey clinging to the door handle for dear life, listening to Katya as she sings questionable renditions of nineties hits at full volume. According to the folder in Trixie's lap, that she'd managed to glance at as Katya nudged her into a hire car, they were investigating a series of suspicious break-ins and one connected assault. Why this was an X-File, or of any interest to Katya, Trixie still wasn't sure, but she concludes that they wouldn't be driving out to investigate something an amateur cop could solve without a good reason. 

"So," Trixie says, over the hum of the radio, "what's with this case?"

Katya drums her fingertips against the steering wheel as they wait in traffic, face impassive as she says "four break ins and one assault, seems like they were all committed by the same person but nobody has caught them yet"

Trixie twists to face her, arms folded. Katya pushes her sunglasses up onto her head, meeting Trixie's eyes with a teasing grin. "You mean _, why are we investigating such a mundane case and where are the aliens_?"

Trixie agrees, "something like that" and Katya laughs, starting the car with a jolt when the light turns green. Trixie finds herself lost, again, at the sound of Katya's laugh; loud, brash, exuberant and startling but somehow so very _Katya_ that it makes her smile, biting it back once she catches herself grinning like a fool in the wing mirror. Something about Katya and her colourful, eclectic soul makes Trixie feel like she's known her forever, makes her wonder if she could keep knowing her, too. 

 "You'll see, when we get there"

"So there _are_ aliens"

Katya laughs again, throwing her head back, but she doesn't offer up any further explanation and so Trixie spends the rest of the drive to Delaware humming along to the radio and wondering what she's let herself in for. 

They pull into the parking lot of a shabby looking diner and Katya parks up as far from the entrance as seems possible, cranks down the window to halfway and then wiggles a packet of cigarettes from her pants pocket. 

"What are we doing here?"

Katya doesn't answer right away; she lights up with an obnoxiously yellow disposable lighter that, upon closer inspection, reads _no worries, mate_ in the kind of awful font you only find on cheap holiday souvenirs, and cranes her neck to blow a cloud of smoke out of the window. Trixie has never been particularly fond of smoking, likely due to extensive poking around inside damaged lungs at med school, but a part of her laments that she can't see the way she knows tendrils of smoke are trickling out through Katya's red-painted lips. 

"Don't be mad" Katya says, "but I actually have no idea what's with this case yet"

" _Katya_ "

"No, okay, _listen_ -" and then she trails off, leaning forwards very suddenly with a delighted gasp, slamming her palm down onto her thigh; "they're here!"

In the distance Trixie spots a garishly-silver campervan with what appears to be an honest-to-god satellite dish bolted to the top. She opens her mouth to ask but before she can, Katya tumbles out of the car and waves in big arcs toward it, until someone sticks their head out of the open side-window and waves back.

"Trixie!" and Katya is leaning back into the car, now, grinning from ear to ear, "come on, come meet my friends!"

She's already hurried halfway across the parking lot by the time Trixie is out of the car, and someone immediately barrels out of the van before it fully stops moving, careening into Katya so fast it nearly bowls her over. She's taller than Katya by a long shot, though it probably has a little to do with the mound of ashy-blond hair piled high atop her head, and as soon as she steps back Trixie spots the most horrific pair of american-flag pants she's possibly ever witnessed. As Trixie nears, the woman's dark eyes land on her suspiciously and she flicks a long, pointed nail in her direction. 

"So _this_ is your sceptical partner?" she asks, voice long and drawling, and Katya jumps backwards to loop her arm through Trixie's.

"This is Trixie Mattel. Trixie, this is Alaska. She's a good friend of mine"

Alaska seems uncertain and so Trixie settles on a generic, polite, "it's nice to meet you" and receives a hum in response, Alaska immediately turning away to re-enter the van. Katya makes a move to follow her and Trixie pulls at her arm, realising when Katya looks at her expectantly that she's supposed to say something. 

"I don't think she likes me" is what she settles on, not willing to go with _I'm unsure if I want to enter this weird van with your intriguing friends_. Katya laughs like Trixie had told a joke, patting her forearm comfortingly. 

"In Alaska's eyes, all FBI agents are garbage until proven otherwise," and at Trixie's confused glance, she adds, "Alaska knew me _before_ I was an agent, and also knows a fair deal about how many assholes I had to deal with in the academy"

"Oh" is Trixie's particularly eloquent response, and then she's being pulled across the gravel and inside the campervan.

Inexplicably, it's filled to the brim with technology; screens and hard-drives and wires and some makeshift devices that Trixie doesn't even want to think about, right now. Some of it looks as though it shouldn't be here at all, and the jobsworth inside Trixie prickles just a little. Toward the back of the van is the main hub of screens, and a petite woman with delicate pink hair is tapping away furiously at a keyboard. There are a few more people in the drivers cab, but Trixie finds herself being nudged bodily toward the pink-haired girl. The typing stops, and Trixie hadn't realised just how much it had filled the air; the silence is a little thick, now, and she's acutely aware that she doesn't belong. Katya shouts, "Courtney!" as though she's not mere feet away, and Trixie just about jumps out of her skin.

"Long time no see, _Yekaterina_ " and the accent is Australian, Trixie notices, but finds herself dwelling more on the fluid pronunciation of Katya's full name. 

Katya wrinkles up her nose, decidedly unimpressed. "Use my full name one more time, you _bitch_ " she says, and Trixie finally pinpoints what it is that makes working with Katya so _different_. She's probably the most casual agent Trixie has ever met; on a usual case, Trixie arrives, asks professional questions, conducts interviews to the _book_ and then makes it home in time for supper. Katya just does whatever she wants - stops off at more fast-food places than seems strictly necessary, looping her way around seemingly unrelated questions to pry information out of unassuming cops so she can scribble new things inside her notebook, driving an hour and a half out of town to meet up with some friends and share inside jokes. Trixie has never really had that. She has friends, back home, and she has friendly colleagues, but she's so work-oriented. She feels out of her depth, maybe, without a strict, professional itinerary.

"You must be Trixie" Courtney says, yanking Trixie from her reverie as she gives her a quick once-over. "Katya hasn't shut up about you"

Katya hisses, kicking at Courtney's shin, and Trixie tries her level best to appear appropriately disinterested. Courtney just grins, long and languid, and moves her eyes very slowly from Trixie, back to Katya. "You never mentioned she was _hot_ , Kat"

Startled, Trixie makes an aborted noise of surprise and then wheels on Katya, already feeling her cheeks prickle with heat. "Are you going to tell me why we're actually here?"

"Oh!" Katya jumps up to sit on the countertop, which looked like it was once a kitchenette but now functions as some sort of makeshift lab, and claps her hands together. "Alaska called me about this one. The break-ins, they've happened in a few other cities; five, to be exact. Now, the weird part is, these same break-ins have happened every twenty-five years, for at least the past _century,_ " her eyes are sparkling. "In almost exactly the same houses, give or take circumstance, and the same unidentifiable _slime_ was found at each scene"

She wiggles her fingers ominously at the word _slime_ , and Trixie tries and fails to wrap her head around all of this. "So - wait. What's the theory here? Copycat crimes?"

Katya and Courtney share a look; behind Katya, Alaska is filing her nails and observing Trixie very closely. "No, the theory is that these were all committed by the same _person_ "

"But," Trixie starts, stops, rubs a hand over her face and then jolts as she remembers her eyeliner, "how. They'd have to be, well, when was the first set of break ins?"

"1918" Courtney supplies.

"They'd be _well_ over 100, Katya, you can't possibly think-"

"-we do, think" Alaska chips in. "We just haven't decided the...species, of the criminal, yet"

For a moment, Trixie considers this. Katya watches her, apprehensive, and finally Trixie huffs out a sigh. "I _knew_ there had to be aliens"

"You signed up for this" Katya reminds her, chipper, and Trixie doesn't have the heart to tell her that she didn't, actually. After a beat of silence, Trixie realises what she thought was multiple voices in the front of the van is actually the sound of a police-radio, dipping in and out of frequency. That, she knows, is almost definitely illegal, and she pinches the bridge of her nose in an effort not to say anything. Seemingly oblivious to her inner turmoil, Katya bounds on, "I've requested to meet with the Sheriff, but he won't see us until tomorrow, so I figure we can drop by a motel and go through all of the case files? Ginger has a stack of information from news archives, that should help us"

It seems easier to just nod in acquiescence than ask any further questions, and Trixie considers that part of her knew she wasn't signing up for conventional, law-abiding work when she agreed to monitor Katya, so she spends the next half hour hovering behind Katya like a lost puppy and pretending not to hear it when Courtney bounds over to the drivers seat, informing who Trixie assumes to be Ginger that _Kat's partner is_ hot _, Ging_. When they finally make it back to the car, Katya goes to buy them burgers whilst Trixie calls up the nearest motel, and Trixie remembers last minute to yell across the lot that she's vegetarian, which makes for a very uncomfortable start to the conversation she has with the motel receptionist. There's only one room available, because of course there is, but at least its a twin, so the very brief and alarming images Trixie has of sharing a bed with Katya dissipate almost as soon as they arrive. 

At the motel, Katya abandons research in favour of lying almost flat on her bed, kicking off her heels and eating the remainder of her fries. Trixie steps out of her own shoes, revelling in the feeling of a surprisingly soft floor on her sore feet, and then asks "so your friends are what, conspiracy theorists?"

"They prefer, extra-terrestrial investigators" Katya explains, matter-of-factly, "though I'm not sure if Ginger has managed to make alien-busters stick yet"

"Wait, surely you don't want to _bust_ the aliens" Trixie protests, stopping short when she realises she's considering the semantics of a nonsense-group, and Katya barks out a laugh.

"My point exactly!"

Trixie sighs, pacing the area of carpet that spreads from the door to the foot of Katya's bed. "I just. I don't understand _how_ you can be friends with them," as she talks, Trixie unpins her tightly wound ponytail and runs soothing fingers through her curls, massaging the pressure from her scalp; "we're FBI agents. Our job is based on logic and science. _None_ of their ideas are remotely plausible"

From her bed, Katya looks up at Trixie through thick lashes, hands propped behind her head. "What? You don't think its _plausible_  that someone could think you're hot?"

"Shut up" Trixie tells her, and then "fine. _Almost_ none of their ideas are plausible. Besides, I'm not sure how much of a compliment it is. They probably think the aliens are hot"

This spurs on one of Katya's full body laughs, hands flailing just a little, and she grins lopsidedly up at Trixie. "Only some of them"

She decides not to respond, fearing that she'll be pulled into another strange conversation about alien semantics, and instead she folds herself down onto her own bed and tugs a stack of folders into her lap. Katya stays put, for the moment, tossing fries into the air and catching most of them in her mouth.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on tumblr @ softrixie!!


	3. cause a little trouble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As she’s stepping into her heels, she thinks to ask Katya if she’s okay to take the car. 
> 
> She _means_ to, except she turns to ask and is immediately aware that Katya is out of her bed, now, making it up as she stands in her pyjamas, little shorts and a tank top. Trixie had gone to bed early last night, while Katya was still smoking outside, and she hadn’t noticed her clothes until right now. Her legs are long, tan and toned – Trixie really doesn’t mean to consider this, but they’re _right there_ , and her arms are slightly muscular, slender and smooth and there’s a tattoo printed on the back of her left arm, twisted just so that Trixie can’t make it out. 
> 
> Trixie blinks slow, once, twice, and just as Katya shifts to turn around, Trixie manages to gather herself enough to dash out of the room, almost forgetting her purse in the process.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi!! thanks again for all of your lovely comments, I'm glad people love this story as much as I do!! 
> 
> I have nothing figured out in terms of an update schedule so far (I'm thinking probably weekly) but I got this one done faster than usual because I felt particularly inspired, so here it is!!

When the soft, low vibrations of Trixie’s phone finally filter through her pillow and into her dreams, she’s relieved to see Katya still sleeping across the room, blonde hair flying loose all over the pillow, mouth soft and agape. She resists staring for too long; she has no reason to stare, firstly, and she reminds herself sternly of this as she tiptoes into the bathroom. Besides that, she has the unreasonable urge to be dressed and ready before Katya wakes. In the mirror above the sink, she’s met with an unruly tangle of thick curls and a smudge of black liner under each eye, the result of forgetting to pack makeup remover and having to hope for the best with hand-wipes. She’d prefer Katya not to see her quite like this.

It’s only once she’s taken a shower, cringing under the firm water pressure and hurriedly rinsing honey-scented suds from her hair; after she’s carefully blow-dried it into submission and pinned it into a high updo, curls falling soft over the silk band tied up over her head; once she’d meticulously applied eyeliner and blush and pretty pink lipgloss, that she realises her mistake. The clothes she was supposed to have brought in here with her, the ones she had neatly folded onto the ground by her nightstand, were still exactly where she’d left them.

She could put her nightgown back on, but she was freshly showered, and didn’t want to ruin her hair – and besides, she wouldn’t be any more covered up in a nightgown than in her towel. Hoping that Katya will still be sleeping, Trixie creeps out into the main room and around to the side of her bed, quickly tucking the stack of clothing under her arm and spinning on her heel. There, she spots Katya, sitting upright in bed with her phone in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.

“Good morning, Trixie”

She’s pulled her hair up into a loose scrunchie but she’s still in her pyjamas, a manila folder open on her lap, one red-painted nail marking her place. Trixie makes an aborted noise, stammers a little and then says “good morning. I’m going into the bathroom now”

Katya is still laughing when Trixie returns, fully dressed and pinker in the face than her soft-rose blush should allow for. Katya opens her mouth to make another comment but Trixie pulls a face, pushing her vague embarrassment to one side in order to drop down on the end of Katya’s bed.

“What’s the agenda?” Katya takes a sip of what appears to just be black coffee and Trixie watches, enraptured, as a loose strand of hair slips from its hold and falls just beside her jaw. “Well, I’ve managed to snag a meeting with the Sheriff in a couple hours’ time. I need you to analyse the substance found at the crime scenes, you’ve got access to the police lab all morning, and I’ll meet you there when I’ve finished up at the station”

Trixie hums. “Sounds good to me. Will they have the analyses of the substances from the 93’ scenes at the lab? I think I’d need to compare them if you want me to prove your theory about them being linked”

“Ooh, look at you getting involved with my wacky theories” Katya notes, raising her brows and smiling around her mug. Trixie rolls her eyes, but says nothing. Katya continues, “I’ll have Alaska bring that down to you once you’re there”

“Oh” Trixie says.

“What? Oh?”

“Nothing, just…Well, anyway. I’d better head off to the labs, they’ll probably be expecting me soon and I’d like to give myself enough time for a couple of tests”

Katya tilts her head, like she’s thinking about something and then she offers Trixie a muted smile, awkwardly pinning her folder in place with her coffee mug so she can use her free hand to rummage around the nightstand for a folded slip of paper. “This is the address; it’s the building that looks like a police station”

“Thanks” Trixie deadpans.

She puts the paper in her purse anyway, once she’s crossed the room to her own bed, and as she’s stepping into her heels she thinks to ask Katya if she’s okay to take the car. She means to, except she turns to ask and is immediately aware that Katya is out of the bed, now, making it up as she stands in her pyjamas, little shorts and a tank top. Trixie had gone to bed early last night, while Katya was still smoking outside, and she hadn’t noticed her clothes until right now. Her legs are long, tan and toned – Trixie really doesn’t mean to consider this, but they’re _right there_ , and her arms are slightly muscular, slender and smooth and there’s a tattoo printed on the back of her left arm, twisted just so that Trixie can’t make it out. Trixie blinks slow, once, twice, and just as Katya shifts to turn around, Trixie manages to gather herself enough to dash out of the room, almost forgetting her purse in the process.

_Real smooth, Trix_ , she reprimands herself. As she drives, she tries to work out why it is that she’s always so stupidly _flustered_ around Katya; maybe it’s because she’s never had a partner before, is unsure how to act around another agent at such close proximity. Maybe it’s because Katya is so quirky, so free and seemingly unbothered by other people – Trixie isn’t particularly shy, but Katya is a breath of fresh air and it makes her feel unbalanced. _Maybe_ , her brain finally interjects, it is simply because Katya is one of the most beautiful women Trixie has ever seen, and Trixie is nothing if not a completely useless lesbian incapable of functioning around women.

She shakes herself out of that train of thought pretty quickly, tuning back into the road a little more and noticing a car right up her bumper. _Asshole_ , she thinks, but she doesn’t speed up because she’s not only a careful driver; she’s petty, too.

At the police station labs, a junior-looking officer is leaning up against the wall in the corridor looking bored to death, and he perks up at the first _clack_ of her heel on the linoleum. “Agent Mattel?”

“That’s me” she confirms and he hurries to unlock the door, so excited to be doing _something_ that he forgets to hold it open and it almost hits Trixie in the nose. “Oh, wow”

With an almost practiced recital he explains where everything is, Trixie allowing him to do so instead of interjecting that most labs like this are exactly the same, and once he’s sure she has everything he dashes from the room. Good, Trixie thinks. She hates being watched when she’s doing labwork, especially by overly-curious types.

Whilst Trixie adores fieldwork and the investigative side of being an FBI agent, nothing makes her feel more content and excited than the scientific side; a rare luxury, one she earned through years of med school and one that makes her valuable in the Bureau. Once she’s geared herself up; in a slightly too-small lab coat, slightly too-loose goggles and a pair of latex blue gloves, she retrieves the samples from the incubator and sets to work. Immediately she finds herself baffled; under the microscope, the sample looks like nothing Trixie has ever seen before. It looked, at first glance, as though it was some kind of DNA. Except there were four helixes instead of two, so tightly coiled that she only spotted them once she’d zoomed all the way in, and the would-be chromosomes were thick and short. Still, it wasn’t out of the question that this might be some sort of rare virus, or bacteria, or _something_ , mimicking a DNA strand. Throughout the course of the morning, Trixie finds herself performing test after test, trying and failing to uncover something logical or obvious in the genetic make-up of this stuff.

Just when she’s at her wits end there’s a short, sharp rap on the lab door and Trixie looks up to lock eyes with Alaska. She tilts her head to gesture that Alaska should enter and she does, carrying what Trixie assumed to be the other cell samples on ice, in a specialist container that made her wonder where on earth she’d obtained it.

“Samples for you. Kat says you know what you’re doing”

Trixie really doesn’t know why Alaska hates her so much; she says “I do” and focuses her energies on the building excitement that she can finally _do_ something today. Even if she doesn’t know what the samples _are_ , she can definitely work out whether or not they’re the same. She transfers the samples immediately into the incubator, and takes out the substance from ’93 to begin with. Behind her, Alaska hops up onto a side-counter and starts to swing her legs, _thunk, thunk, thunk_ against the cabinets. Lifting her head from the microscope, Trixie cranes her neck and raises her eyebrows above her goggles.

“Are you going to stay there?”

Alaska shrugs. “You know how many times they’ve tried to take these samples from me? I’m not leaving them with some FBI agent”

Figuring it probably isn’t worth the argument, she simply nods and turns back to her work. First, she cross-references the samples and confirms, much to her own surprise and confusion, that they all appear to be from the same source. If she could only figure out _what_ it was….it just didn’t make any sense that whatever this was, it had been obtained by all of the copycat criminals for _something_. Maybe it was some sort of chemical, something to remove fingerprints. But then why did it look so much like DNA? And who passes something like that down as a family heirloom?

Frustrated, Trixie steps back from the microscope and huffs. Alaska hops down from the countertop and sidles over, mouth quirking ever so slightly when she asks “having trouble?”

“No”

“Can I take a look?” She moves to the microscope and Trixie reaches out a hand to stop her. Alaska frowns. “I _am_ qualified, Miss Mattel”

“That’s nice, but you’re not not wearing any gloves and your hair is down. It would make my investigation easier if you didn’t contaminate the evidence”

“ _Your_ investigation? We’ve been looking into this case for five years, you’ve been looking into it for five minutes”

They look at each other in silence for a few moments, Trixie’s arms folded across her chest and Alaska’s planted on her hips, and Trixie narrows her eyes; “I’m the FBI Agent here, and I’ve been assigned this case”

“Actually, _Katya_ was assigned this case-” and then, as though on cue, the door to the lab opens and Katya dashes in, wide grin quickly twisting into a frown when she sees the apparent stand-off she’s walked into. She’s got her hair tied into two dumb ponytails and she’s wearing a brown pinafore dress, which should by all reasonable accounts look _awful_ but somehow doesn’t. She’s holding a paper bag in one hand and Alaska decides she’s had enough of staring Trixie down, swishing across the lab to pinch the bag from her grasp and retrieve a powdered donut from inside it. Trixie grinds her teeth.

Katya looks like she’s ready to ask, and Trixie knows she couldn’t explain her frustration with Alaska even if she tried. Before she has to potentially face _that_ disaster of a conversation, she gestures for Katya to come over and take a look at what she’s found so far.

“Okay, so this is the new sample right here” Trixie begins, and Katya eagerly leans over the microscope, pushing her ponytails back over her shoulder. “If you look, it appears as though it might be-”

“DNA!” Katya exclaims, hands flailing;

“-well, maybe. I can’t work that out, yet. I have no idea what it is. But if we switch the slides, this one here is the ’93 sample”

Katya studies it for a moment, enraptured, and then she gasps, switching the two slides back and forth before eventually slamming her hand down on the counter and exclaiming. “They’re the same! I knew it, I knew they’d be the same!”

Alaska moves in, placing her hand on the curve of Katya’s hip to move her out of the way, and Trixie has a sudden flash of something akin to realisation; maybe Alaska _likes_ Katya. Maybe they're even _dating_ ; Katya had introduced Alaska as a good friend, but isn’t that the way Trixie had introduced her last girlfriend to her family when she was still too nervous to name it? Katya isn’t particularly a nervous person, and Alaska doesn’t seem that way either, but _still_. Maybe its why Alaska is so cold toward Trixie; maybe she can sense the way Trixie tries not to look at Katya, maybe she’s jealous.

Katya waves her hand back and forth before Trixie’s face and she blinks, confused, drags herself back into focus to see Katya tilting her head in confusion and Alaska leaning by the door, arms folded, brow raised.

“Sorry” Trixie says, dusting her labcoat distractedly, “what did you say?”

“Lost you for a minute there” Katya laughs, leaning just a little into Trixie’s space, “I said, would you be able to get some images done of the new cells? Then we’ve got somewhere to be”

_Somewhere to be_ turns out to be a run-down barn on the outskirts of the little town, because of course it is, and Katya explains that multiple witnesses had seen the supposed perpetrator running in that direction, and it seemed the only feasible hideout in that area. Katya is driving again; still erratic, still vaguely concerning, but Trixie focuses on the breeze coming though the cracked window and the way it ruffles the fluffy curls of Katya’s hair. The morning has been tiring and Trixie rolls her shoulders back and stretches her neck to follow, leaning back against the headrest to peer out of the window. For a while it’s vaguely peaceful, watching the trees and fields go by, until she catches glimpse of a car in the wing-mirror and frowns a little. This is the second time today she’s had a black car right up her bumper and when you’re an FBI agent, you have to notice these things. She figures it’s a coincidence; maybe this is a town where everyone owns a black car and is an asshole. She forgets about it for a few minutes, nudging off a high heeled shoe and relishing in the brief feeling of relief, stretching her toes over the shiny pointed front. She glances up again and there it is; that same car.

“Katya” she says, slowly, on a hunch. “Don’t look, but we’re being followed”

Katya tenses up, but she doesn’t look behind her. “What do you mean?”

Trixie stares straight ahead. “The car behind us was following me earlier. Pull over, slowly, and act like we’ve broken down”

Carefully, Katya hits at the brakes a few times to make the car judder and then she pulls over, crawlingly slow, to the side of the road. Trixie jumps out and Katya follows, almost coordinated, and she pops the hood so that they can obscure themselves behind it, peering at the road unseen. They hear the car approach; then, they hear the tell-tale sound of an engine slowing down. Trixie curses quietly, and Katya places a tentative hand on the gun in her pocket. Slowly, the car rolls to a halt beside them and a tinted window slides slowly down; Katya takes a half-step in front of Trixie and meets the gaze of a man in dark shades.

With a careful, level tone, he says “drop this case, Agent Zamolodchikova” and before either of them can really process that, he drives away. Trixie is baffled; Katya curses under her breath.

“What was _that_ about?” Trixie asks, mostly into the air because she doesn’t particularly expect Katya to have any more of an idea than she herself does, but Katya turns to face her and looks – almost serious?

“It means we’re getting too close, ебать” and she’s closing the hood with force, jittery fingers clasped around the curved hood hovering for just a second before she jumps back into the car and Trixie can see, through the front window just slightly dusted by mud, that she’s tapping red nails anxiously against the leather steering wheel.

“Hey” Trixie says, voice soft as she climbs into the car, and she startles when Katya immediately starts the car; she knows that she needs Katya to explain before they go driving into a possible hostile situation, and she quickly places her hand over Katya’s on the gearstick to stop her from moving it. It works; Katya pauses instantly, and Trixie very swiftly considers that she can feel the soft skin on Katya’s hand beneath her own fingers; that the warm band of the ring on her pointer finger is probably pressing against Katya’s knuckle; that the soft pink of her nail polish clashes with the deep red of Katya’s, but also doesn’t, and she quickly draws her hand back and smooths out the fabric of her skirt.

“Tell me what’s going on?” Trixie asks, carefully, and Katya twists the keys back to switch off the ignition.

“This always happens” Katya explains, frustration barely masked. “The same pattern. I get close to uncovering something, they send someone to scare me off and then if I _do_ get to the scene before they pack up and run, there’s always some way to apprehend me”

There’s a lot for Trixie to unpick there and she hesitates for a few moments, trying to figure out where to start. In the end, she asks “who are _they_?”

Oddly, Katya laughs. “I don’t know. I still don’t know. Some higher government agency? Probably. But they’re always non-descript, always lurking. They’ve been onto me for years”

Trixie, logically, wants to think that Katya is insane. She does, but something about the sincerity in Katya’s voice sends her for a loop, something about this whole situation feels off. Who was the man in the car? How did he know Katya, or anything about the case they were on, where they’d be?

“Okay” Trixie tells her, “alright. Well, whoever they are, it doesn’t matter. We’re FBI agents, right? This is our case. Come on, lets go”

Katya fixes her with a beaming smile, reaches out to put a hand on Trixie’s knee, just briefly, and says “thank you.”

For what, exactly, Trixie can’t be fully sure, but before she can think to query it the car is coming to life and Katya is driving them down the winding road, just as maniacally and jovially as she had been before. It wasn’t a long drive, but Trixie spent it looking nervously over her shoulder; it isn’t the scariest thing to have happened to her through her career as an agent, but it is still disconcerting, and she firmly believed that if you weren’t nervous then you weren’t doing your job properly. As they drew near enough to be able to catch a glimpse of the barn, Trixie spots a number of dark, looming cars and Katya swears lightly under her breath.

“Don’t look at them, look ahead or down” Katya murmurs. As Trixie rummages distractedly through her purse, they drive by the barn and Katya pulls to a stop a good few yards down the road, where she’s sure they won’t be noticed. Together, they move silently and stealthily along the side of the road until they reach a thicket of bushes, which Katya gestures that they should duck behind. It takes a few moments for Trixie’s eyes to adjust to her obscured view through the branches and when they do, she’s surprised. Considering they’re on the hunt for what she’d assumed to be one man, from the limited information Katya had gathered, the sheer density of people milling around the barn was particularly unusual. They seemed like military personnel, dressed in all-black uniform with caps pulled low enough to obscure their eyes, and guns strapped to their fronts.

“What’s going on here?” Trixie whispers.

“I don’t know” is Katya’s hushed response, “but I’ve seen these people before. Alaska and Courtney were right; this _is_ alien”

“It is?”

“Sure. Not only is the substance we found almost positively a form of extra-terrestrial DNA-”

“-I never actually said-”

“-But these are the same people that always show up when I get close to anything extra-terrestrial, and look at the way they’re surrounding that barn. _Something_ is in there, Trixie. We have to get closer”

Trixie observes their surroundings, as well as she can through the cover of the bushes. A few yards in front is a large, rounded bail of hay and Trixie nudges Katya, nodding over to it. Katya moves first, somehow managing to run nimbly whilst still crouched, and she nods back to Trixie in order to give her the go ahead. Thinking quickly, Trixie steps out of her heels in order to diminish any possible sound that might give her away, and she makes it across to Katya’s side successfully. As she puts the shoes back on, Katya watches her with a bemused smile and at the querying glance, simply shakes her head. They realise quickly that they have no peephole behind the tightly packed hay; one of them is going to have to peer _around it_ , instead. Katya decides to brave it and, as she does, Trixie finds herself considering how strange this situation is. Here, crouched behind a looming bail of hay, she feels – dare she say – like a _criminal_. As an FBI Agent, she’s used to being hands-on and upfront. She walks in, flashes her badge, asks her questions and makes whatever arrests she needs to in order to close the case. She’s done stake-outs, she’s done undercover work, she’s ducked into hiding in order to avoid being shot. Never has she done this; hidden from what appear to be authority figures, feeling like she’s trespassing.

Plus, she thinks there’s a sharp piece of hay in the back of her shoe, and she’s too worried about revealing their position to adjust it right now.

“Shit” Katya hisses, pulling herself in and bumping shoulders with Trixie as she did; “I think one of them saw me”

“They did?”

Trixie scrambles for a solution, meeting Katya’s wide-eyes with a look that says she had no idea how they're going to get out of this, and before either of them can speak Trixie feels a strong hand grab her by the collar of her shirt, yanking her to her feet.

“Agents Zamolodchikova and Mattel” a voice says, as another pair of hands snatch the gun and badge from Trixie’s skirt. She looks over at Katya, who mouths _told you_ with an almost teasing smile, and Trixie rolls her eyes. This, she thinks, is going to look _great_ on her record. “You’re under arrest”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on tumblr @ softrixie!!


	4. run and hide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I cannot have two of my agents, one of whom has up until now been _extremely_ highly regarded, interfering with CIA business and getting themselves _arrested_ ”
> 
> It falls silent. _Up until now_ echoes on a loop in Trixie’s mind and she clenches her hands so hard in her lap that she leaves crescent-shaped delves in her palm from her fingernails. Katya sits forward again but slowly, now, hands clasped together as opposed to gesticulating wildly. 
> 
> “Please” she says, and her voice is earnest and soft, “whatever punishment you have, leave Trixie out of it. This was my fault, she just happened to be with me”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one took a little longer than usual but here it is!! I'm a little nervous about this one because i can't tell if it feels a little disjointed? but i hope you like it!!

“So” Trixie says. “We got arrested”

From where she’s sitting just across the cell, cross-legged on the cold floor, Katya shoots her a lopsided sort of grin. “We sure did”. She’s taken her hair out of the two fluffy ponytails now and has been braiding it into some sort of strange up-do for the past thirty minutes. She had initially pulled a bobby-pin out of the back of her hair and offered to break them out of jail, but one stern glance from Trixie had stopped that idea before it even began to take shape. They weren’t technically in a jail; it was a temporary build, with a few cells, and having demanded to see their identification Trixie had discovered that the people who arrested them were actually from a branch of the CIA. That was well over an hour ago, now.

The cell is small; Trixie has her back to the only wall, her knees tucked up to her chest for warmth and Katya is a few feet away, looking remarkably calm and collected. “I can’t believe we- I’ve never been arrested, before. I _do_ the arresting”

“I have” Katya says, fingers deftly spinning a strand of hair up into a plait. “Been arrested, that is”

Trixie blinks at her and Katya responds with a beaming smile, naturally. “You have? Do I even want to know?”

“You probably don’t. This isn’t my first run-in with the CIA, though”

“Of course it isn’t” Trixie remarks, shivering just a little as a draft moves through the building. Her head is going a hundred miles a minute; what will this mean for her reputation? Her career? What if she gets taken off this case, separated from Katya? That last one, she realises, is a new contender in the cycle of catastrophic thoughts. She hadn’t considered it as something to be worried about, but as she watches Katya fish bobby-pins out of the pocket of her cardigan, she decides that she wants to stay. She _likes_ Katya; inexplicably, Katya is the first agent she’s met that she might even go so far as to consider a friend. She has ‘friends’ in the agency, of course she does, but no one she’d ever want to permanently work with, no one she’d consider a partner. Not that she considers Katya a partner, of course, and Katya most likely doesn’t consider her one, but….it could happen. Even though their beliefs don’t align in the slightest, and Trixie has higher aims for herself than pursuing aliens, she can’t help but envisage a future of them solving cases together. Maybe. Or maybe sitting in a cell is driving her mad.

“Trixie?” Katya asks, hands paused in mid-air. “You’re shivering. Are you cold?”

She looks so earnest, head tilted just slightly like some sort of confused puppy. Trixie shakes her head, says “it’s alright, just chilly in here” and Katya immediately shrugs off her cardigan, throwing it across so that it lands in Trixie’s lap. The thing is, objectively, it really is an ugly cardigan. It’s the sort of brown that probably suits no-one in this world other than Katya, intentionally bobbled with _interesting_ frills on the sleeve. When Katya was wearing it, Trixie hadn’t even noticed that it was bad. Now, she notices, but she also notices that it feels soft, and still holds lingering warmth from Katya having worn it, and she shrugs it on even if it goes against all of her fashion morals. “Thanks, Katya”

“It’s okay, I’m always too hot”

Trixie bites her tongue.

She pulls the frilled sleeves down over her fingers and subtly tucks the cold tip of her nose into the collar. It smells faintly of cigarettes and something sweet like honey, and Trixie tries to think of something to talk about so that she doesn’t bury her entire face in it.

“So, I still don’t understand how you’re so relaxed about this” she offers up, and Katya sighs.

“Because it means I was right”

“About what?”

She uncrosses her legs and rearranges her skirt, then holds out her hand palm up. “Can I have a bobby pin?

“What?”

“From my cardigan” and Trixie remembers that yes, she’s wearing Katya’s cardigan, and she fishes around in the pocket – finding tissues, a lighter and some paperclips – to pass her a pin as she starts to explain. “Alaska didn’t want to tell you, but we were pretty sure we knew what was going on. The fact that we’ve been intercepted by the CIA means we got too close to the truth, and they had to stop us from uncovering it. They put two and two together just in time to get there first; its why I was so frustrated earlier”

Trixie doesn’t dwell on the first part. Instead, she asks, “so, what was it? What was your theory?”

“Well, the reason this case was so prevalent is that the village has been crime-free for as long as anyone can remember. I don’t just mean _oh, its been a few decades since someone was murdered_ \- I mean there’s no crime, at all. Except for these five cases of burglary. The first one was a coincidence; an old-school criminal ‘mastermind’ who worked his way around small towns happened to get caught, and then the succeeding cases were all carefully orchestrated”

“So, copycat criminals?”

“No. See, the reason this town has been crime-free has everything to do with that barn we tried to get into. Something crash-landed in the early 1900’s, and has been kept there ever since”

Trixie raises her eyebrows. “In a barn?”

“It isn’t actually a barn” Katya explains, “it’s a secret facility”

Her accent, Trixie notices, becomes more pronounced when she’s enthusiastic and not prioritising her enunciation; its incredibly endearing, the way she rolls her _r’s_ thickly, and Trixie is ridiculously taken by it. “So, wait. How does – and I’m assuming you’re talking about aliens again – how does an alien stop crime?”

“Ah” Katya says, “isn’t that the question? We theorised that it has some kind of…heightened sense, one humans don’t have. Possibly something almost psychic, a visual thing. It can see danger, fear or crime and somehow was able to stop it before it occurred. Ginger thinks that it left its physical body inside the facility and got out some other way, but I think that’s impractical”

“Huh” Trixie says.

“I think it wanted to stay there, for whatever reason, and so returned of its own accord. Anyway, to cut a long story short, something happened during that first burglary. Maybe the alien was hurt, I don’t know, but it left the DNA substance behind. We _think_ its probably some sort of blood-”

“Wait, I thought you didn’t know what it was?”

“Sorry. Alaska had figured it out, but we wanted to be sure, and wanted to be sure they were all the same”

Trixie tries not to be too offended, but she can’t help but feel put out. Katya continues, “I think, the other four burglaries were…influenced, if you will, by the alien. I think he wanted to create a pattern, wanted someone to notice and figure it out”

“Huh” Trixie repeats. This is _insane_. Katya looks so incredibly sincere but this whole story is illogical; how on earth is she supposed to believe that the root of this case is a vigilante alien leaving a trail of evidence over the span of a century? Katya’s face drops just a little.

“You don’t believe me”

“No! Um…I just. This is just…”

There’s a slam in the distance. Katya’s head snaps toward the corridor and Trixie breathes a sigh of relief; she’s stuck somewhere between not wanting to upset Katya but not remotely believing her, either. The thing is…there has to be _something_ going on here. Trixie tries to lay this out in her mind, logically and rationally. If this was just a normal, run-of-the-mill burglary case, then why had they been – as Katya put it – intercepted? Why had they been warned away from this case by a mystery man and then arrested for trying to carry out their investigation. What _was_ in that barn? Somebody clears their throat and Trixie notices a pair of shoes just by the entrance to the cell; she follows them up, past neatly-pressed pants and a sharp blazer, until she finally meets the eye of Chief Charles.

“Mattel, Zamolodchikova” he says, arms folded across his chest. The CIA man behind him looks very, very unimpressed. “I’ve spoken to the agents here, and you are free to leave”

Katya has already unfolded herself from the ground and she holds out a hand to help Trixie up. Her fingers are warm and soft and Trixie doesn’t think about holding her hand; she quickly dusts herself off and follows Charles, who has already turned on his heel.

“Sir, we-”

“Not now, Agent Mattel. We will have this conversation in my office”

“But-”

Charles stops, turns, and looks her in the eye. “In my office, Mattel”

Trixie feels defeated. Her mind begins to race again; the fact that he wants to have the conversation in a professional setting probably means there’ll be someone else present, a witness, to take notes for the file Charles will ultimately submit when he fires Trixie for good. God, she can’t be fired. She _can’t_. This job is everything to her, she loves being an FBI agent. She wouldn’t know what to do with herself if she was fired. Maybe she could go back to med school, become a doctor. Unless her records were tarnished so badly that they wouldn’t have her, and she’d have to be a grocery packer just to pay her bills. Katya, clearly sensing the catastrophizing going on inside Trixie’s head, loops her arm through Trixie’s in an attempt to bring her back. Trixie is too frantic; she pulls herself away and power-walks to the car, realising that she now has to stand and wait for Katya with the keys.

The first twenty minutes of the drive is unbearable. Trixie is close to tears with the stress of it all and Katya keeps making quiet sounds, like she’s starting a sentence and then thinking better of it. Eventually Trixie turns the radio on low, just to kill the silence, but it feels wrong without Katya singing along like a maniac.

“Trixie” Katya says eventually. “Trixie, I’m really sorry”

“Don’t be” Trixie tells her, can’t bring herself to say anything else. They spend the rest of the drive in silence, Trixie chewing so harshly on her fingernails that she chips the polish and Katya cracking the drivers window to smoke her way through a packet of cigarettes whilst she drives.

Back at the Bureau, Trixie thinks her heart is going to pound out of her chest with nerves.

They’d had to wait outside for thirty minutes, hearing the low sound of Charles speaking to somebody inside without knowing what it was about. Katya had made a few attempts at conversation but Trixie was too frantic, filled with doubt and worry and eventually Katya had wandered off outside, returning fifteen minutes later and bringing along an air of cigarette smoke. It hadn’t occurred to Trixie to wonder, as they were being called into the office, why it was that she hadn’t seen whoever was already in there leave. It was only once they found themselves sitting stiffly in the seats opposite Charles’ desk that Trixie realised there was a man sitting just off to the side.

“So” Charles began, taking a seat and shuffling a stack of papers, no doubt a report filled with their wrongdoings. “You got arrested”

“Sir, I can only apologise” Trixie says immediately, “we made a serious error in judgement and I can assure you it will never happen again”

Before she’s even finished, Katya sits forwards abruptly. “No, hold on. That was _our_ case, and we were so close to finding something, something that-”

“Something” Charles interrupts, “that was none of your concern, Agent Zamolodchikova”

There’s a sound, a lighter flicking open and then closed, and Trixie realises with a jolt that the man in the corner is the same man who was present when Trixie was assigned to work with Katya. She wonders if Katya knows, if she’s ever seen him before. He makes her feel uncomfortable, and she can’t quite pinpoint why that is. Beside her, Katya huffs out a frustrated breath.

“Charles-”

“You could have ruined a serious investigation, Katya”

“-I could have uncovered some _truth_!” she exclaims, “whatever bullshit story they fed you, I _know_ what was going on there”

“That is enough” Charles’ voice is firm, and Trixie goes cold all over. “I cannot have two of my agents, one of whom has up until now been _extremely_ highly regarded, interfering with CIA business and getting themselves _arrested_ ”

It falls silent. _Up until now_ echoes on a loop in Trixie’s mind and she clenches her hands so hard in her lap that she leaves crescent-shaped delves in her palm from her fingernails. Katya sits forward again but slowly, now, hands clasped together as opposed to gesticulating wildly.

“Please” she says, and her voice is earnest and soft, “whatever punishment you have, leave Trixie out of it. This was my fault, she just happened to be with me”

Trixie startles; she looks over at Katya in the hope of meeting her eye, trying to figure out what on earth she’s doing, but Katya remains steadfast in staring straight ahead and Trixie is left baffled. She hadn’t expected Katya to back down at all, and she can’t believe that she would try and save Trixie in the process. She wants to protest, tell Charles that she should be equally to blame but she can’t find the words.

She doesn’t have to.

Before she can process it, Charles is crumpling the reports into a ball and tossing them into the trash. “Do not” he says, levelling Katya with a firm stare, “let this happen again. I would like to speak with Agent Mattel, but you’re free to leave”

Katya stands, silent, and leaves without so much as looking at Trixie or even thanking Chief Charles. For a moment, Trixie finds herself frozen with shock; she’s seen an Agent suspended for far less than interfering with higher-government business, and they’re what? Being let off with a slap on the wrist? The door clicks shut behind Katya and for a moment, Trixie panics again, wondering if Charles will punish her after all. Katya has been getting away with this kind of stuff for years; Trixie is supposed to be better, more capable. Maybe this was a test, and she’s failed it, and _god_ , how could she be so _stupid_?

Silently, the man in the corner stands and makes his way over to Charles and he crouches, whispering something in his ear. As he speaks, he stares Trixie dead in the eye for a few unsettling moments before standing, making his quiet, ominous way back to the corner of the room.

“Mattel” Charles says, voice stretched a little thin. He takes off his glasses, scrubs a hand over his eyes. “I need your report on this case as soon as you can get it to me. I need every single detail you can recall, and I need you to promise me that this will not happen again. Your job is to supervise and disprove; not to become involved”

Something like irritation stirs in Trixie; her _job_ is to investigate and persecute, not to shadow another agent for no good reason. She feels almost patronised, but the tension in the room is too thick for her to snap back about it and so she nods, instead, folding her hands in her lap. “I have to ask you” she says, carefully. “What is going on with this case? What was that?”

For just a moment, Charles hesitates. There’s _something_ in the expression on his face that tells Trixie he’s hiding something, that he does know what was happening and maybe, just maybe, an inkling that he _wants_ to tell her, but it passes and he stands abruptly.

“Nothing for you to worry about” is what he settles on. “That will be all”

Outside, Trixie makes it halfway to Katya’s office before the stress of the past few days hits her like a ton of bricks, and for the first time she can remember Trixie turns on her heel and walks out of the bureau early. She knows that she should talk to Katya, that Katya might even be _waiting_ for her, but she hasn’t felt wired like this since she first started at the FBI and she needs to be at home, really think about what she’s gotten herself into. She wonders, briefly, how Charles would take it if she asked that someone else be assigned to Katya, but the thought of it makes her feel slightly sick. Spending so much time with Katya, seeing her passions and her reasons first hand; Trixie doesn’t think she could walk away that easily, let someone else come in, someone who might be harsher, might break Katya down. She doesn’t deserve that.

And she _likes_ Katya, as stupid as it is. She wants to sit in her strange little office and bicker over aliens; it feels _good_ , it feels like she’s finally found something that was missing, something other than work, work, work.

Reaching home, Trixie is so distracted that she almost trips herself up on the same frayed carpet she’s been stepping around for the past two years; almost drops her keys twice and then sticks the wrong one in the lock before she finally lets herself in, and she almost cockles her ankle trying to kick off her heels. She hears a soft sound in the distance, a gentle padding of feet and she calls out “where are you, sweetheart?”

A few moments later a small, energised bundle of fluff throws himself at her shins and she crouches down, taking his tiny face between her two hands. “Hi, baby. Hello, sweet baby. I’ve missed you”

Buttons wiggles his way onto her lap and tries to lick her face, his little paws tapping away at her chest. She’d had her neighbour keep an eye on him whilst she was held up in Delaware; it was an arrangement that worked well; she’d given the older lady a key pretty soon after she’d adopted Buttons and realised there were days that she wouldn’t make it home. It was nice, since Judith lived alone and _adored_ Buttons. Trixie knew that she took him over to her own apartment and let him live a life of luxury, snoozing on her sofa and eating treats to his hearts content, but she couldn’t blame her, honestly.

“Have you been good for Aunt Judith? Of course you have, my good boy”

She scoops him up into her arms and he wiggles happily, still trying to lick at her chin as she deposits her purse on the countertop, her keys in the fruit bowl that has never housed fruit, and she carries him through to the bedroom where he leaps eagerly onto the soft duvet. Trixie had adopted Buttons before she’d even bought furniture; she had been on her way to the apartment for the first time after picking up the keys and she just happened to be stuck in traffic right across from the Shelter, had spotted Buttons in the window, a tiny little poodle-cross with big, sad eyes. She had been utterly enamoured and taken the first U-turn she could find to double back and visit him, walking out thirty minutes later with a puppy and a bag full of supplies.

“Shall we take you for a little walk, honey?” she calls this over her shoulder as she’s half-in her wardrobe, pulling out some leggings and a soft, baby pink jumper to replace her work attire, and she can already hear the way he’s running around in circles on the bed. “I’ll take that as a yes”

She clips on his harness, grabs her coat and takes him around the block until he tires himself out. As they walk, she slips into her own mind a little and wonders if Katya is okay. Maybe she should have gone to see her, after all. She doesn’t want Katya to think Trixie is mad with _her_ , and God, that’s probably exactly what she thinks. She pulls out her phone, hesitates for a few moments, and begins to type.

**Trixie**

_I’m sorry I left after the meeting, I had to get home. I hope you’re okay!!_

A reply comes almost instantly.

**Katya**

_why wouldn’t I be? didn’t I tell you I’ve had run-ins with the CIA already, tracy?_

Trixie rolls her eyes, tamping down on a smile. When the CIA agent had taken their information, he’d somehow misheard Trixie and ignored any and all attempts at correction, calling her _Tracy_ a grand total of five times. Katya had snickered and Trixie knew, somehow, that it would come back to bite her.

**Trixie**

_don’t you dare make that a thing!! really though, you didn’t have to try and take the heat off of me. that was really nice of you, but we’re in this together_

As she steers Buttons back towards home, Trixie watches the three little dots appear and then disappear at the bottom of their text screen. It’s only when she’s back inside, curled up on the sofa with Buttons sprawled across her lap, does she finally get a response.

**Katya**

_we are?_

**Trixie**

_of course we are_

**Katya**

_good_

_I’ll have you believing in extra-terrestrial life in no time_

She attaches a string of alien-face emojis and Trixie rolls her eyes.

_are you busy?_

Trixie considers this. She knows, realistically, that Katya probably wants to talk about the case, but she’s not in the mood to go back to the Bureau today. She doesn’t want to say _yes_ , because she’s not actually busy, but doesn’t want to say no and open another can of worms when she has to decline going back to Katya’s office. She glances down at Buttons in her lap, sleeping quietly, and decides exactly how she’s going to respond.

**Trixie**

_[One Image Attached]_

_Does this count as busy?_

**Katya**

_YOU HAVE A DOG?!_

_WHAT IS HIS NAME?!_

_OH MY GOD?!_

**Trixie**

_buttons_

**Katya**

_BUTTONS_

_this is amazing_

**Trixie**

_did you want to talk about the case?_

**Katya**

_i did but I wouldn’t want to tear you away from buttons_

Trixie locks her phone for a moment, passing it between her fingers as she thinks. Should she ask? Would it be weird? Yes.

Maybe? _No_. It wouldn’t be weird. They're kind of friends, right? They do need to get to know each other better, if they’re going to be working together, relying on each other. Trixie surmises that she only regards it as weird because she thinks Katya is hot, and she’s being a big dumb lesbian about it for no good reason. Huffing, she unlocks her phone.

**Trixie**

_you could come over?_

_kill two birds with one stone, meet buttons and talk aliens_

**Katya**

_dogs and aliens? you know the way to a girl’s heart_

Trixie feels the tips of her cheeks flush pink.

_what’s your address? I’ll come over as soon as I’ve finished this report_

Trixie shoots off a text detailing her address and some directions, promptly tossing her phone onto the couch cushion beside her. She gives herself a few moments to worry, and then she notices the state of her apartment – she’s never been the tidiest person, and living alone leaves a lot of room for laziness – and she jumps up to clean it with such speed that she startles Buttons into consciousness.

God, why did she invite Katya to her _apartment_? Granted, she’s been over to Katya’s, but she could have suggested somewhere neutral, like a coffee shop. Somewhere she wouldn’t have to frantically throw crumpled clothes behind the already-full hamper, at least. Somewhere that didn’t have one of her lacy bras hooked over the corner of the radiator to dry, didn’t have a startling amount of pink décor in the lounge. She can’t remember the last time she had a friend over, and she has no idea why she feels this strange urge to _impress_ Katya, or at least make her think she’s an organised human person.

Just as she’s doing the walk of shame from her room to the kitchen, three mugs and a plate in hand, her phone vibrates on the sofa and she makes a detour to catch a glimpse of the message, almost dropping her stack of indignity in a panic when she sees it.

**Katya**

_I’m here!_

Well, Trixie thinks, as she deposits the dishes into the sink and takes one last glance around her home.

This is going to be something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on tumblr @ softrixie


	5. into the darkness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When they pull up at the restaurant Katya has chosen Trixie is glad she settled on a dress; it isn’t an overly high-class establishment but there are certainly businessmen in suits and middle-class women with fancy up-dos, so she would have felt out of place dressed any other way. They take a seat by the window at Katya’s insistence and in the sunlight, Trixie notices the shimmer dusted across her cheekbones and the silvery-white highlights in her blonde hair. She’s _frustratingly_ attractive, Trixie thinks. The waitress who comes to take their drink order says something that makes Katya emit a pretty laugh and Trixie is so distracted it takes the waitress tapping her shoulder for her to snap out of it and order a sweet tea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [alyssa voice] I'm back back back back back again. hello!! if any of you are still here I'm so sorry that this chapter has taken me so long - I've been finishing up my degree, moving house and then dealing with the flu - but that's finally all finished and I'm hoping to get back to a regular update schedule!! 
> 
> I've reworked this chapter like, five times so I hope you all enjoy it!!

Trixie needn’t have bothered with the last minute fussing and tidying; with the dragging seconds spent fluffing her hair into something a little more presentable and flooding the apartment with a _spiced apple_ room spray. Katya’s knock, when it comes, is so rapid and impatient that as she makes her way over to the door, she at first assumes that it must be someone else. Maybe the younger woman downstairs who liked to come to Trixie about the fights with her boyfriend instead of calling the police; Trixie always obliged, but there really are only so many times you can advise someone to end the relationship and file for a restraining order. She opens the door a little cautiously, surprised when it is, in fact, Katya. She looks a little frantic, eyes wide and filled with a sparkling sort of excitement. She’s clutching her mid-length red coat around her waist and her hair is windswept, shorter than Trixie had seen it just this morning. It sits in a wavy bob just below her jaw and it _really_ suits her, brings out the sharp angles of her cheekbones.

“Are you okay?” 

“Yes! Sorry. Oh, wow!” Buttons has crept forwards to nudge his nose against Trixie’s ankle, curious about the sudden presence of a new person in his home. Katya crouches down, reaching out her hands to cup his tiny face and play with his soft ears. “Oh, Trixie, he’s _lovely_ ”

She’s crouched right in front of Trixie; Trixie makes a vague noise of distress and takes a nonchalant step away as to distance Katya’s face from its previous alignment. “He is. He’s my baby”

“Oh, I love him. _Oh_ ” she stands abruptly. Disgruntled, Buttons turns and pads over to his bed. “We have to go”

“What?”

“I know, I’m sorry, but my informant left me a message and I think this is big”

Trixie considers this, tries to process the whiplash of going from a quiet chat about the day’s events to meeting some mystery informant at the drop of a hat. Katya is watching her earnestly. On one hand, Trixie doesn’t want anything to do with another case that falls under Chief Charles’ radar. On the other, something close to curiosity sparks in the back of her mind. She sighs, defeated, and Katya lights up. “Fine”

“You’re a doll” Katya tells her, grasping both of Trixie’s forearms in excitement. The pressure of Katya’s thumbs curving into the underside of of her wrists is warm and sends a shiver up to her elbow; she hopes Katya can’t feel the skip in her pulse. 

“Let me change really quick; where are we meeting this guy?”

Trixie asks this over her shoulder as she starts toward her bedroom and she hears Katya make her way a little further into the front room; “well, she’ll find us so it doesn’t really matter. We could grab dinner?”

“What do you mean she’ll _find_ us?”

As she opens the sliding door to her closet, Trixie’s gaze snags on the chunk of longer, more flowy fabric at the far side of her closet. They’re still hanging in the same order she remembers putting them in when she first moved into this apartment; in fact, it’s the only part of her closet that has any semblance of order. The last time she did anything that wasn’t working, visiting the gym or grocery shopping was…so long ago now. She’s been living in her formal workwear, her comfy leggings and her gym pants. She runs her fingers across the pleated skirt of a pink dress she used to _adore_ , and Katya calls out “Eh…its complicated.”

“Well, un-complicate it?”

As Trixie slips on her dress she hears Katya’s intake of breath and then she says “I don’t know her, not really. She works in the government, so everything is top secret. I don’t even know her name – I know her only as _Visage_. She wants to help me but can’t risk getting caught, so we have signals and wherever I go, she finds me”

“Ominous” Trixie says.

“Maybe” Katya replies. “She’s been a good informant for a while now, so…”

Katya stops in her tracks when Trixie walks back through to the front room, falters for half a second and then beams. “Lookin’ good”

Trixie flushes pink; “is it too much? I haven’t, um. Haven’t really worn a dress in a while. Never really had the occasion”

Katya stands and crosses the carpet to stand before Trixie, tilting her head to one side. She reaches out to untuck a loose curl that had gotten tucked into the embroidered collar, fingers brushing the curve of Trixie’s neck, and she says “you should wear them more often”

The look she gives Trixie is intense, lingering and before Trixie completely short-circuits, Katya grins and steps back. Turning away, she says “you never need an occasion to wear something nice. Wear whatever you want, whenever you want. Life’s too short”

“Explains some of your fashion choices” Trixie returns, having recovered. Katya gives her a faux-glare. “You know I’m right. Just let me go and ask my neighbour to keep an eye on Buttons and then we can go”

When they pull up at the restaurant Katya has chosen Trixie is glad she settled on a dress; it isn’t an overly high-class establishment but there are certainly businessmen in suits and middle-class women with fancy up-dos, so she would have felt out of place dressed any other way. They take a seat by the window at Katya’s insistence and in the sunlight, Trixie notices the shimmer dusted across her cheekbones and the silvery-white highlights in her blonde hair. She’s _frustratingly_ attractive, Trixie thinks. The waitress who comes to take their drink order says something that makes Katya emit a pretty laugh and Trixie is so distracted it takes the waitress tapping her shoulder for her to snap out of it and order a sweet tea. 

“So what does she look like? What am I looking for?”

“ _About_ that-”

“You don’t _know_?”

“-I do! I do, its just that she always wears a high-neck jacket, shades and a hat. All I can tell you is that her accent is uh, Jersey?”

“Why do I trust you?” Trixie mostly asks this to herself, and Katya gives her a guarded sort of smile. 

“You do?”

“Unfortunately” Trixie quips, but something about the earnest look in her eyes makes Trixie a little sincere. “I don’t know…you’re _honest_. You’re eccentric and reckless and a downright idiot but you’re honest and I do trust you”

Katya drops her glance down to the table and looks up again from beneath her lashes. Riding a sudden unexpected wave of confidence, Trixie takes a sip of her sweet tea and says “it helps that you’re pretty, too”

Katya’s eyes widen and she beams, all pretty white teeth gleaming between a bemused smile. “Yeah? Why does that help?”

Trixie hadn’t thought this far ahead; she falters and flushes pink and is beginning to regret all of her life choices that led up to this dinner when Katya’s eyes flit to the other side of the room and she emits a quiet gasp; “Okay, she’s here”

Trixie whips her head around but doesn’t spot anyone particularly inconspicuous; though, it isn’t as though Katya gave her much of a description to go on. Katya stands and says “I’m going to the bathroom” and then she taps the outline of her cell phone in her pants pocket. Trixie sits back and takes a sip of her sweet tea. The secrecy feels off, somehow, and she’s still reeling from almost spectacularly embarrassing herself. After a few moments of sipping her tea and watching the cars pass by outside, she pulls her phone from her purse and sees Katya’s message;

**Katya**   
_head for the bathrooms_

Part of her wants to remark that the bathrooms aren’t the best place for a secretive meeting but she supposes as an FBI agent, she’s seen and done much worse. As she heads down the hallway at the back of the restaurant she feels something grab tight around her wrist; she swings a fist up toward the perpetrator and startles when Katya’s hand wraps around it. “Easy, Trix. Get in here”

“Jesus _Christ_ , Katya”

_Here_ is a storage closet filled with an excess of napkin packets and boxes of cutlery, where a woman in a dark coat stands in the far corner. 

“Is this a bad spy movie?” Trixie hisses, as Katya closes the door behind her and tucks herself into place beside Trixie. 

“We don’t have much time” the woman says plainly, and Trixie immediately feels that something is _off_ with her. She folds her arms, defensively, but listens nonetheless. “there is a brown envelope under the passenger seat of your car. Follow the instructions and you’ll find the information you’re looking for”

A beat of silence. 

Trixie raises a brow. “Is that it?”

The woman turns to Katya, says “you know what to do” and then pushes past the two of them to leave the closet. 

“What the hell _was_ that?” Trixie asks.

Katya gives her a sheepish kind of smile. “She isn’t one for detail. The envelope should help, though, and she rarely makes the effort to meet me in person unless she has something particularly important to share”

Wondering how long they should wait to dispel suspicion, but knowing that they’ve been gone a few minutes which looks suspect in and of itself, Trixie turns to glance at the door. As she twists her head back she settles her gaze on Katya, who is fiddling with her new bangs. 

“I like the new hair, by the way” 

Katya stops fiddling and _beams_. She opens her mouth to respond and as she does, someone starts to twist the handle to the closet. They both freeze, distinctly aware that they have mere seconds to think of _something_ and there’s nowhere to hide, nothing to disguise themselves with. Katya meets Trixie’s eye with a startled look, places a hand at Trixie’s waist and says “sorry about this” – Trixie opens her mouth to ask what she means but Katya is coming closer, curling the fingers of her other hand at the underside of Trixie’s jaw and before she can really register it, Katya is kissing her.

Their lips meet. Trixie instinctively grabs Katya’s hip, mouth responding almost on autopilot as she reciprocates the gentle movements with a careful enthusiasm and then the door swings open, forcing them apart in feigned shock. The latter applies only to Katya, as Trixie had short-circuited the second Katya’s hand had cupped her face – she just hopes that Katya doesn’t sense that Trixie’s shock is entirely real. 

Thankfully for them, the understandably-startled person who has the unfortunate luck of opening the door is a young, speechless waiter and _not_ a manager; Katya fluffs at her hair and says “oh, we’re _so_ sorry”

“Uh…uhm? I…uh”

She takes a small step away from Trixie, reaches _into her bra_ and hands the stammering boy a ten-dollar bill. “We were never here” she says, winks at the poor thing and then pulls Trixie out of the closet by the hand. They walk quietly through the restaurant, shoulders brushing, deciding silently that dinner can wait for another day. Trixie’s mind is racing. She completely understands why kissing just happened, of course; there was really no logical explanation for them being in a storage closet other than having snuck off to get handsy. The embarrassed waiter will remember it as a date that went way too well, so it definitely worked. Still, Trixie is already overthinking it and will likely be doing so for the rest of the week; recalling the touch of Katya’s hand at her waist, cool fingertips beneath her chin, soft mouth pressed up against Trixie’s own and leaving smudges of waxy red lipstick in its wake. 

As they return to the car, Trixie instantly flips down the sun visor to check her makeup in the mirror; as she thought, there are little swipes of red tinting her own pink lipstick. Glancing over at Katya reveals the opposite effect. As soon as both car doors have slammed shut Katya grabs at Trixie’s hand and stares at her with big, concerned eyes. “Trixie, I’m so sorry if I made you uncomfortable – it was the only thing I could think of”

“Oh” Trixie says. She’s still slightly distracted by the pink smudge in the centre of Katya’s bottom lip. “It’s okay, it’s fine. Not the first time I’ve kissed a girl in the closet”

Katya blinks, slightly startled at this admission. “Oh”

“Yeah”

“Huh”

There’s a moment of quiet contemplation and then Trixie remembers the envelope; reaching beneath her seat she feels around until her fingers brush against the paper and as she grabs it, she realises she should have checked it wasn’t some sort of trap first. Nonetheless she hands it to Katya, who seems to have become distracted enough that she forgot about it, too. There’s a beat of silence between them, followed by the rustling of papers and then Katya huffs out a laugh.

“Oh, god. What?”

In answer, Katya holds up what Trixie quickly identifies as a map. There’s an X. Katya giggles. 

“I feel like I’m in an episode of Scooby Doo” Trixie deadpans. 

Over the rumble of the car coming to life, Katya replies “Zoinks!”

Something about her accent makes it hysterically funny. Trixie is overcome with laughter, so much so that it takes her ten minutes to actually pick up the map and see where it is they’re going. It looks to be an industrial estate, which is both suspicious and unsurprising. She’s frustrated that she has no idea what they’re supposed to be _looking_ for – Visage went to all that effort and couldn’t afford a few minutes to tell them what they’re going to find when they get there? Wherever there _is_? Katya looks remarkably unfazed; her long, painted nails tapping in time to the radio where they rest on the steering wheel as a soft hum dances behind her lips. Trixie considers that she would never launch an investigation on so little evidence ordinarily; would never be so reckless without hours – if not days – of research. 

And yet, here she is. 

There’s just something about all of this – about the X-Files, about Katya – that has her yearning for more. Perhaps the lack of logic is what draws her in so much, the sheer amount of circles she finds herself running around just to find a solution that only fits part of the mould. In her regular cases she follows the same basic outline and always comes up with a clean, justified answer. Trixie’s Guide to FBI is as follows;

1\. Read the briefing. Read it again. Highlight anything that seems important, or suspicious  
2\. Survey the crime scene. Take notes, annotate the briefing sheet, paint a mental image of the perpetrator and their movements  
3\. Conduct interviews. Witnesses, Victims. Cross-reference these accounts with the crime scene evidence  
4\. Analyse forensic evidence. Find a match, or eliminate a suspect  
5\. If necessary, conduct a second set of interviews. See if anyone changes their answers  
6\. Hopefully, and most often, catch the criminal.

It makes sense. It’s precise, it has a definitive answer. Trixie’s method is very much 2+2=4. Katya’s method, Trixie can only assume, is to throw a dart at a map, find a city and see if anything weird happened there. Which is why it makes no sense, really, that Trixie likes it so much. The frustration of not having a clear answer, having to push herself to search further and dig deeper, makes part of her come alive like she hasn’t in a while. It isn’t that she’d been finding her job boring, just. _Predictable_. Katya is so very unpredictable, and Trixie is enamoured.

They eventually pull into a parking lot surrounded by unsightly factories and warehouses. As she scans the area for anything suspicious or untoward, Trixie realises that finding anything of relevance here would be like finding a needle in a haystack. She didn’t know what she was expecting; a neon, flashing sign detailing _alien stuff, this way_? As Katya puts the car into park she huffs out another laugh under her breath.

“What?”

“What are the odds,” Katya begins, “that the building we’re looking for is that one?”

“Oh, for fucks sake” 

Naturally, the building Katya is referring to is the only one on the estate that seems to be empty; not just empty but completely run-down and dilapidated. Graffiti stretches over the boarded windows and remnants of shattered glass make the growing weeds glitter in the sun. As Trixie looks around for anything that might point to a solution other than the nightmare-factory, Katya steps out into the sunshine and lights up a cigarette. She always seems so calm and collected, despite having no idea what she’s going to step into. The soft breeze nags at her new bangs and sends the smoke spiralling toward the fluffy white clouds. Katya purses her lips as she smokes, Trixie has noticed, and it makes her think about what happened earlier at the restaurant. Katya had _kissed_ her. Granted, it was to maintain a plausible disguise, but that doesn’t make the physical happenings any less memorable. Trixie would love to wax poetic about the sensations of it, she really would, but she was so blindsided that she didn’t have time to memorise it. She recalls the distinct closeness of Katya, the brush of her bangs against Trixie’s forehead and the faint smell of smoke coming off of her like an aura. She remembers the waxy feeling of Katya’s lipstick smudged up against her own and the slightest hint of warmth, and not a whole lot else after that. 

She touches her fingertips to her lips, absent minded. 

“Hey” Katya calls. “You ready, Trix?”

They manage to find a loose board across a door around the back of the building. Trixie had envisaged Katya bodyslamming her way through a window or something, so the easy entrance comes as somewhat of a relief. As she steps over the splintered doorstep into the ominously desolated warehouse, Trixie regrets wearing little pink heels and a _dress_ ; though, she’d assumed the information they were going to receive was desk-work and that she’d still be able to enjoy a dinner with Katya. 

And yet.

Here she is stepping over broken glass and years worth of debris, with _no_ idea what she’s supposed to be finding in here other than a reason to get a tetanus shot. At least she’d had the foresight to fasten on her thigh holster before she left the house. It always makes her laugh; it was a gift from one of her friends, Shea, from back home. Before she’d left Shea had gifted it to her and Trixie had nearly cried laughing, not sure where she would ever need a thigh holster as an FBI agent. It had stayed in her closet for months collecting dust until she went to a formal event early in her career and realised she had no pocket or belt-line to fasten her things to. 

As it is she pulls her little torch from it’s fastening and follows Katya across the lower floor of the warehouse. Katya says something in frustrated Russian and then repeats herself for Trixie’s benefit, explaining – “there’s nothing here to suggest _anything_ ”

Trixie hums in agreement. She can see a door that leads to perhaps an office, one to what would have been a break room – the only windows still in-tact show a miserable looking sofa and an old, yellowing refrigerator – and one that she hopes leads to a hallway. Katya is observing the large metal stairway in the centre of the warehouse with an expression that Trixie doesn’t quite like. 

“Don’t even think about it” she says, “we don’t know that this isn’t condemned and I swear to god I’m not having you die if those stairs cave in”

Katya gives her a delighted grin; “Careful, you almost sound as though you like having me around”

Trixie doesn’t dignify this with a response, and instead tracks her way across the littered ground toward the dismal break-room. She doesn’t think there’ll be anything to find in there other than mouldy furniture, and she figures it’ll be an easy procedural sweep to begin with whilst she wraps her head around the fact that she’s exploring a potentially dangerous, abandoned factory with no idea what she’s looking for. 

Immediately she feels that this whole expedition is useless; one rotted old sofa, a yellowing refrigerator, a plastic table with no seats and a big, tall metal bookshelf. As she peers around, letting the light from her torch sweep gently over every surface, she gets the inkling that something in here doesn’t _fit_. It’s like when you know that something is wrong with the picture but your eyes can’t quite pick it out yet, something so minute that you perhaps wouldn’t notice it at first. Her torch light sweeps in a slow arc around the room until it lands on the bookshelf, and she finally sees it. “Hey, Katya?”

Clearly having found nothing of interest herself, Katya quickly joins Trixie and her eyes follow the stream of her torchlight toward the metal shelving.

“Do you see it?” Trixie asks. 

Katya takes a step closer, peering intently. “Oh!”

Everything in the room is covered in a thick layer of yellow-grey dust; everything except the bookshelf. Trixie untucks a latex glove from her holster and swipes her finger across one of the shelves. “That’s probably a month, maybe two months’ worth of dust. Nothing else in here has been touched in _years_. What does that mean?”

For a moment Katya doesn’t answer, choosing instead to turn away and shine her torch at the ground. Trixie realises that there’s a subtle, barely noticeable thinning of debris in a direct path from the entrance to the bookshelf.

“Well, isn’t that something” Katya mutters.   
No one is coming into an abandoned warehouse to dust an empty bookshelf. 

Katya moves to touch the furniture and Trixie waves her off, gesturing to her own gloved hands which she then uses to push the unit off to one side. The thing is heavier than it looks, and so it takes her a few moments of heaving to get it out of the way. A cold breeze tickles at her ankles at the same time that Katya gasps, and as Trixie shoves the shelving one final time she finds herself looking at an open doorway, one that leads into a dark and ominous space. Katya and Trixie lock eyes, both a little unsure. “Do you think this is what Visage wanted us to find?”

Katya shrugs. “It’s suspicious enough, isn’t it?”

Trixie shines her torch out into the space, revealing an unlit corridor and six metal doors. For some reason, Trixie feels the hairs on the back of her neck stand up the second she thinks about stepping over the threshold. She’s been doing this job for long enough, now, that nothing particularly scares her anymore; she had learned to compartmentalise and switch off her built-in fear responses, ignore the biological horror at gruesome crime scenes. She reasons that the cause of her apprehension is simply down to this being an off-the-record investigation - that no-one knows that they’re here, if anything goes wrong. The anxiety of not _knowing_ , not having reams of prepared research to consult is the thing making her feel uneasy. She decides to avoid telling Katya any of this, knowing that she would take it to mean something _spooky_ is afoot.

“Well,” she sighs finally, “lets go find some aliens, or whatever” 

Katya lets out a shout of gleeful laughter and leads the way, swinging her torch around as though she’s in a funhouse. Luckily, and yet suspiciously, the switch they find in the first room is still functioning. A long, clinical lightbulb flickers to life and pours enough light into the room that Trixie is able to flick off her torch and tuck it away. 

“Do you think all of the rooms are filled with cabinets like this one?” Katya starts to ask, “because if – ” as she turns to direct this question back to Trixie, she cuts herself off with a strangled noise. Trixie looks up, alarmed, and finds that Katya has her gaze honed in on the movement of Trixie sliding the torch back into the leather strap around her thigh. 

“Oh” she says, voice softer than Trixie thinks she’s ever heard it. It makes her feel a little smug. 

She asks, “what?” and schools her expression to mimic innocence. Katya swallows visibly, blinks rapidly and then spins on her heel.

“So, uh. Filing cabinets! Lots of them”

Trixie can see that the room is, as Katya had tried to say, lined with tall, metal filing units. Curiosity sparks and she crosses the hallway to the second room – it, too, is filled with cabinets. There are sixteen in each room, five drawers in each. Unless whatever they’re looking for jumps out and smacks them in the face, Trixie realises that they could be here for _hours_. 

“Katya…” she hedges, unwilling to break her spirit but equally unwilling to spend five hours in a dank building, looking for something that might not even be of any worth to them. Before she can continue with that particular train of thought, Katya picks a drawer at random and plucks out a folder. She gestures that Trixie should continue but, intrigued now, Trixie watches her skim through the file. “What is it?”

“I don’t know” Katya says, frowning a little. “Something about an experiment, but…hold on”

She peers back into the cabinet and seems to be hit with a flash of hope, which morphs into an ecstatic sort of realisation when she checks a different cabinet altogether. 

“I think I know what we’re looking for” she says. “They’re organised by year. This is 2001, so 1995 must be…”

She’s walking through the room as she says this, back out into the corridor and further along to the third room. Trixie follows along clueless, watching as Katya rifles through more cabinets until she finds the one she’s looking for. “1995! Z must be at the bottom, right?”

“You think they have a file on you?” Trixie asks, and then “wait, you were _not_ born in 1995”

“Uh, wow, okay” Katya turns and raises one brow, hand on her hip. “I _could_ be”

Trixie giggles. “Anyway, I’m looking for my sister’s file. Samantha”

“ _Oh_ ”

Something uncomfortable curls deep in Trixie’s gut; she can’t help but feel like Katya will find disappointment in that cabinet, whether she comes across what she’s looking for or not. The way Trixie sees it, Katya will either find nothing and be left as clueless as she was when she entered, or she’ll find something that she really wishes she hadn’t. In an effort to give her privacy but without straying too far, Trixie wanders over to a cabinet at random across the room. The small, yellowed label tacked to the front says _1988_ , and something makes all of the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. 

She moves to the next cabinet along. 

_1989_

She crouches, observing the drawers. 

_K-O_.

She isn’t expecting to find anything; mere curiosity and the desire to step away and gather her thoughts is the only thing that propels her to search under her own name. Behind her, the sound of metal scraping lightly against metal tells her that Katya is still searching and so she crouches down, flicking mindlessly through the files in the lower drawers. At random, she selects one and flips it open to see what it is they’re dealing with. While Katya is convinced that this will lead to answers about her sister, Trixie isn’t so sure. 

What she finds inside is _odd_. There’s a photograph of a woman clipped onto the first page, and it takes Trixie a few moments to understand why it looks so wrong. The way the hair is settled; splayed out at odd angles and curved up around the neck, suggests that she’s lying down. The vacant, wide stare in her eyes tells Trixie that the woman is very clearly barely conscious. 

A shiver runs down her spine. There’s something incredibly unsettling about this now, moreso than before, and the feeling only worsens as she continues to skim through the page. There are a few chunks of code that she can’t understand, a list of dates spanning from 1989 to 2015 and a series of photographs showing what looks to be a small incision just behind the woman’s ear. 

Nothing that she’s seeing makes any sense. Trixie hates to say it, but this is the kind of thing she’s only ever seen in the glimpses she’s had of Katya’s X-Files. Her curiosity has damped considerably, now, and she slips the file back into the drawer. Katya can find what she’s looking for and then they’re leaving. 

Katya can buy her dinner, for her troubles. 

Only when she goes to close the drawer does her gaze land on something that makes her heart shoot up into the back of her throat. 

There, tucked behind the _M_ divider; _Mattel, Beatrice J._

Her pulse is hammering and her fingers are shaking so badly that she can barely open the folder. Like the first, there’s a photograph pinned to the front. Only, this is a photo of _Trixie_ – and one she’s never seen before, at that. It completely unsettles her in ways she couldn’t even begin to explain. In the image, she sees herself lying on a white pillow, hair twisted into two plaits that she only wears to sleep in. Her eyes are hooded with exhaustion but her stare is wide, her pupils large.

She’s absolutely _terrified_. Everything is the same as the first file was; the dates, the codes, the photographs. 

_Photographs_

That same incision is there, only Trixie has a tiny heart tattooed behind her right ear and she feels sick when she spots it in the photograph. At first, when she fumbles and prods at the skin behind her ear, she feels nothing but smooth skin – then something catches, and she barely swallows a choked scream when she feels a sharp lump. 

“Trixie? Hey, what is it?” and then Katya is by her side, taking one of Trixie’s shaking hands in her own and instinctively tracing soft soothing circles by her thumb. “What happened?”

Wordlessly and still in complete shock, she thrusts the folder toward Katya. After a second of heavy silence, Katya simply says; “ _shit_ ”

Trixie knew she’d become more involved in the X-Files than she thought she wanted to; she never thought she’d end up inside one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> follow me on tumblr @ softrixie

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @ softrixie


End file.
